


a blueprint to our future

by bartsugsy



Category: Emmerdale
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2018-12-03 13:00:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11532759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bartsugsy/pseuds/bartsugsy
Summary: for all that she sometimes dreamed of travelling the world, blowing her inheritance on stupid and crazy adventures, all liv had ever really wanted was ultimately exactly what she ended up with.or: 2026 roblivion antics.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> I am not tesla and I cannot predict the future so for my own sanity we’re just going to pretend that there have basically been no technological advances in the ten years following from 2016, I just want to write about married robron and adult bisexual liv. 
> 
> Warnings - a whole heap of discussion around alcoholism/central character with alcohol dependency problems. If you need further clarity around this, please don’t hesitate to ask me.
> 
> This all spawned out of me going mad with boredom one night and creating a ‘2026 robron’ tag and then accidentally falling in love with liv in the little universe I had created. And then it accidentally became angsty. I started writing back in mid-2016, before the mill was even a sparkle in our collective eyes. I have shoehorned it into here but references to canon beyond that are essentially just glossed over.
> 
> Anyways, I picked this up again a year later and smashed the majority of it out in a few hours instead of doing the thing I was supposed to be doing take pity on my soul.
> 
> It's canon compliant only up to somewhere around early 2017. We'll just go with it.

The alarm on Liv’s phone signalling the tick of the clock over to 8am buzzes loudly in a way that is not at all unexpected but still the fucking worst. Liv digs her face further into her pillow, having already spent the last 40 minutes trying to desperately ignore the bright sunlight shining obnoxiously through her old, dust-covered window.

The day that she can put curtains across every damn window in this house, she decides as she reaches over the side of the bed to try and blindly reach her still buzzing phone, will be the best day of her life.

Eventually, she sits up and squints into the sunlight, grasping her phone in her right hand tightly. She can't quite bring herself to look down at it yet. It's been 4 days since she broke up with Steven on a drunken but clearly honest whim and he still hasn't responded.

Liv has stared at the little double ticks indicating a received, opened and read message next to her awful (and surprisingly legible) text so often she's surprised she hasn't burnt a hole through her phone screen yet. The very thought of the messages she had sent to him ( _I think you like me more than I like you_ and then, about 2 minutes later, _I don't really care if this works,_ followed immediately by a series of sad face emojis, plus that one where the monkey covers his own eyes) keeps digging into her chest, drumming away at her like an insistent howl of wind against the shaky windows of her slightly battered heart.

She hates the feeling of guilt. And beneath that, of failure. Hates it.

She squeezes her hand around her phone once more before finally looking down. There's one notification; a stupid fist emoji from Robert that she assumes is a continuation of the conversation they were having last night (something about an ongoing bet they have around Aaron finally getting fed up and running away with Adam, a topic she has teased Robert about for almost as long as she has known him). She gets lost staring blankly for a moment at the screen, before she realises that it's 10 past and she needs to get out of bed, get ready and go meet Aaron at the scrapyard.

When Liv gets there, Aaron is threatening to throw a piece of metal at Adam’s head and Adam is pretending to shield his face while laughing loudly.

“Don't you lot have actual work to do?” She says, face wrinkling up grumpily. It's too early to deal with the two of them together.

“Ah, go on, make us a tea Olivia. Your brother here won't let me go in the cabin.” Adam says, still laughing.

“No, I told you I needed help lifting this.” Aaron says, gesturing to the giant plate of rusty metal at his feet.  “Two minutes, it will take you. Stick the kettle on after.”

“Yeah but my hands are cold, aren't they? Can't lift properly if they don't have a cuppa to warm them up.”

“You're such an idiot.” Aaron says.

Liv silently shoves her way past Adam and into the portacabin, rolling her eyes but filling up the kettle nonetheless.

Liv still hasn't told Aaron about Steven. It's not that he'll be upset - from the subtle comments he's made the handful of times he's met Steven, Liv’s pretty sure Aaron doesn't even like him - but she still can't do it. It's the guilt, she thinks. Doesn't want to have to admit out loud something she's ashamed of. Or any of the rest of it.

A drunken text to end a 7 month relationship. Who even does that? The knowledge of the answer sits heavy on her entire body.

She makes the teas on autopilot, too lost in her thoughts and the still-pounding ache in her chest. When she's finished, she forces herself to take a deep, steadying breath. Aaron alternates between being completely oblivious about her moods and the most attentive person on the planet and even after all these years, she can't work out when she'll be able to hide something from him, or for how long.

Not that she typically hides things from him so much anymore.

Knowing that even if he does notice, Aaron won't pry too much when there are other people around, Liv grabs the mugs and walks outside, shoving one cup into Adam’s waiting hands on the way to see her brother.

“Cheers,” Aaron says, putting down a car seat headrest and taking the second cup from Liv. “What time are you heading out?”

“Soon.” She says.

She notices Aaron glance over to her car and braces herself for the inevitable.

“Are you really taking _that_ all the way to Stockton?”

“Don't start-”

“It doesn't even look like it will get you 20 minutes-”

“Yes it will, you say that every time and every time it's fine.”

“Oi, I'm a mechanic, I know a lost cause when I see one. Can you not just take mine?”

“Is this the only reason you wanted to see me before I go?” From the look on his face, she _knows_ it is. “Leave it alone Aaron.” She snaps, with a little more bite than she usually would. His brow creases a little and she mentally kicks herself, because she knows she's been sussed.

“Are you just in a mood, or what?”

“It's nothing.” She says, still sounding mean. “I'm off. I'll call you once I've spoken to the guy.”

“Yeah, well come round to ours for dinner tonight. Bring Steven, or whatever.”

Definitely sussed.

Aaron can't know it's Steven she's upset about - he's never been _that_ good - and she thinks the additional invite for him was made with relatively innocent intentions. Aaron’s plan, she thinks, is more that he's going to give her a good meal, try and cheer her up a little and then eventually, when she doesn't seem too much like she's going to fly off the handle (which, she wouldn't, ok, but Aaron always thinks she’s potentially 10 seconds away from going spare because he’s a worrier who worries too much), get her alone and force her to talk.

“It'll just be me.” She says, and leaves it there. “See you later.” She hurries to her beaten up little car and climbs in before either Aaron or Adam can ask her about it, then speeds off as quickly as her admittedly rattling car will allow.

She has a two hour drive ahead of her, all to collect a massive, second hand chest of drawers from someone who was selling it for cheap on ebay. Two hours, Liv thinks, is way too much time to be trapped alone with your thoughts when you're actively trying to avoid them.

She wishes she had brought someone along to take her mind off it - one of her friends maybe, but they all _know_ and they'd only want to talk about the break up, so instead she turns the radio up to as loud a volume as she can stand and tries to drown out everything.

One successful transaction and well over 100 miles of driving later, Liv is sitting in traffic when the sound of her phone ringing comes through the car speakers, interrupting the still loud radio.

 _Aaron calling_ , the mechanical voice announces. She sighs and hits the answer button.

“Yeah?”

“Hey, you on your way back yet?”

“Yeah, should only be another hour.”

“Ok, well you may as well come straight over once you've dropped off the thing.”

“Yeah, fine.” She says, distracted by a driver trying to cut into her lane.

“That car still running then?” Aaron gets this familiar, half distressed, half exasperated tone to his voice whenever he talks about her car. Chas calls it his “Liv voice”.

“It's fine.”

There's a pause, as Liv tries to navigate around the dickhead with a death wish trying to cut her up and Aaron works out how to bring up what she knows he wants to.

“So are you and Steven…”

“I broke up with him.” She says it steadily, as if there's nothing more to it.

“Right. Do you want to talk…?”

Liv smiles despite herself. It's been ten years and still he sounds so unsure. He can be great at the emotional conversations when he has to be, her brother. He's got the best heart of anyone she knows, he's the best person in her life, and he loves her just as completely and unconditionally as she loves him - but wow, even now he can still be so awkward when he tries to talk to her about her relationships.

“Do _you_ want to talk?” She says, grinning.

“Did he hurt you or-”

“ _No_ , give it a rest. I'll talk to you when I see you, alright?”

“Yeah, fine, see you later.”

“Yeah, bye.”

The radio suddenly starts up again without warning, still as obnoxiously loud as she had it before, making her jump far enough out of her seat that her seatbelt digs into her shoulder and her car swerves a little sharply to the side where her arms had jolted reflexively.

She gets herself back on course and turns the radio volume down to normal human levels, ignoring the angry horn of the car to her right. _As if_ she was ever going to actually crash into him.

  


When Liv arrives at Aaron and Robert's place, she finds that she has to steel herself a little. She takes a few deep breathes and shoves her key in the door.

Once she's inside, she kicks her shoes off and throws her bag on the floor by the staircase, before looking up towards the kitchen, following the familiar sound of Robert threatening someone down the phone.

He glances up as she moves further into the room and smiles at her. She grins back and flops down onto their obscenely comfortable sofa. She loves her barely standing fixer-upper, she does, but with everything covered in dust and plaster and the few items of furniture covered in sheets, sometimes she just misses home comforts. More specifically, Aaron and Robert’s big blue sofa.

Robert is wrapping up his call, talking about a meeting he has in a few days and still sounding annoyed (it's his ‘I work with idiots’ voice and Liv has heard it many, many times before).

“I hope you appreciate the things I do for you.” He says abruptly, finally hanging up the phone and turning to face her properly.

“You're the best surrogate dad-brother in the world.” Liv responds drily. It's another running joke they have, their weird, unnameable relationship to one another.

“Too right. I’ve got you a plasterer for next week.” He holds his phone up and waves it at her. “He’ll give you a call tomorrow to get more details.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

Robert smiles down at her, before glancing up in the direction of the stairs (and she assumes, Aaron).

“So you and Steven?”

Liv sighs, absolutely not surprised that Robert and Aaron have already spoken about this.

“I dumped him over text.” She says. The best thing about Robert - one of the best things - is that he's done enough unmentionably bad in his life that he's never really judged her for any of the bad she's done.

He has judged her heavily for the _stupid_ things she's done, but honestly he's really in no place to do that either.

Robert’s face looks like it's struggling to keep in a grin. Unlike Aaron, who is usually at least a little subtle, Robert has never even tried to act like he hasn't hated _every single one_ of her boyfriends or girlfriends.

Her first boyfriend as a teenager, Nathan, was two years older with a cocky smile and nice eyes. Aaron would get a twitch in his eye every time Nathan was around. Eventually she caught Robert trying to con him into leaving the country. She moved out of the house and in with Chas for almost a month after and had refused to talk to either Aaron or Robert for the entire time. Aaron had pretty much had to beg and she had relented, still angry but missing them too much.

Robert was slightly better with Karen, although he did make her cry once, but that was less on purpose and more because Karen had overheard Robert saying some less than savoury things to a haulage contact. (She had threatened to go to the police and ended up getting some decent hush money from Robert as a payout. Liv is still bitter about that one.)

Next was Collin (a girl named Collin, Aaron had given her endless amounts of stick about that). Collin got off the lightest of the bunch, mostly because they were only seeing each other for about 2 weeks and Aaron and Robert only ever met her once, when she was drunk out of her skull on vodka and Liv had had to cart her home, and because it ended long before either of them had the chance to interfere.

Following on from Collin was Jason, who both of them (Robert says it was just his doing, but Aaron’s face says differently) ended up locking in a cupboard for 5 hours. They don't talk about Jason.

And finally, Steven. Steven was nice, pretty funny, had a sort of horrible, sort of exciting habit of committing various acts of petty theft (which Aaron and Robert had never been allowed to find out about). He had a good smile and a decent taste in movies, not too boring, liked to steal stupid worthless gifts for her just because he could and because he was “thinking of her”. He liked to flick through her sketchbook and talk to her about the ways her style had developed over the years. It was nice. Too nice.

They got along too well, she thinks. She’s not sure she was built for a peaceful life, a life without kinks and arguments and cracks creeping up the walls, big and obtrusive and ugly. Maybe that’s what most people want. Maybe that’s what she should want. It probably is. Her sobriety isn’t exactly the sort of thing she wants to accidentally break because she’s easily turned off by nice things. She knows she could always be one particularly bad argument away from a drink, regardless of how good a handle she thinks she’s got on it with 7 years of practice.

Maybe a life with a petty thief isn’t what most people would call ‘peaceful’, she thinks, but at 24 years old with 7 years sobriety to her name, save for a handful of largely minor slips, she’s also not sure that she has a conventional definition of ‘peace’ anyway.

Still, she thinks she should have liked him more - was maybe supposed to like him more. Instead, she got drunk and broke up with him.

She has been valiantly, over the past four days, ignoring the alcohol-induced part of all of this, which is about the least healthy thing she can do, she knows. It’s ridiculous. She wasn’t even - she wasn’t sad about Steven, she wasn’t angry, she wasn’t upset or in any sort of mood that would normally trigger that desire to neck a litre of vodka over the course of a night and pretend like everything is fine. She was just… she had felt helpless. Lost and entirely unsure why. And she had nothing better to do.

Objectively she knows that she has it pretty good for a 24 year old - her own business that, despite all her grumbling, she _loves_ , multiple properties to her name, an amazing family and a massive, crazy, loving extended family. She had a good boyfriend - one who was nice, one who she never suspected would end up nudging her back off the wagon again, however momentarily.

Objectively she also knows this means nothing in the face of alcohol dependency.

Robert is eyeing up her phone, held tightly in her hand, and she knows immediately what he’s going to say.

“C’mon then, give us a look at the text.”

She jerks her phone away from him slightly, shoots him a small glare.

“No chance.”

“Fine. He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“No, lay off. It just wasn’t right.” She doesn’t really know how to put into words something she can’t quite grasp herself. “Why are you two at home at this time, anyway? Skiving again?”

Robert doesn’t even deign that with a response, suddenly preoccupied with a message that has come through on his phone. He’s got the start of another smug smile edging across his face, so she’s already mid-way through rolling her eyes as he looks up and waves his phone in her direction.

“Maxim caved, we got that paint at the price we wanted.” He says. She grins despite herself as he finally drops next to her on the sofa. “Don’t say I never do anything for ya.”

Going into business with Rob had been an easy choice, in the end. She was already part way through fixing up her first house and having issues with Grizzly Neil and sourcing suppliers and it was all a lot harder than she had ever really expected - it was so easy to let Robert step in, to yell at the people who needed yelling at, to manage how quickly things got done. She and Neil had the manual labour down, but the business side of things - that was all Robert. Plus, she liked him. Liked his company. Ultimately liked having this one thing that was just theirs, outside of Aaron. She and Aaron shared near on everything else with one another and she loved him more than anyone in the world, but it was important, she figured, to have something with her other brother too.

He’s still looking down at his phone, grinning and typing out a response and his shoulders gently nudge against hers in familiar camaraderie. She looks down at her own phone, still in her hand and on the opposite side of where Robert is sitting, then looks back up at Robert’s face and takes a breath.

“I was drinking. When I sent that text, I mean.” She feels his entire right arm stiffen against hers and sees his face mutate into something more controlled. “I was drunk.”

He takes a moment before looking up.

“When?”

“Four days ago. I haven’t touched it since.”

“Ok. Who knows?”

“Just you.”

“Not Angie?” Her therapist. Dr Miller. Probably certifiable herself but has saved Liv’s life more times than she can count.

“I will. I’ll do it today. I just wanted to pretend…” Liv can feel the anger bubbling in her chest, low level, directed at herself mostly. She takes a breath. “I wanted to forget it happened.”

“How does that work then?” Rob says, voice gentle.

“It doesn’t.”

Robert glances back up the stairs again, towards Aaron.

“What’s he even doing up there?” She says, her eyes automatically following Robert’s path to the spiral metal staircase.

“He’s on a call to Emile. Told you we weren’t skiving.” He smiles slightly.

“No you didn’t, you didn’t say anything.”

“Can you call Angie?”

She rolls her eyes and waves her phone at him slightly, before glancing down at the screen. She’s got a message from Gabby on there, mostly eye roll emojis, maybe the continuation of a conversation she forgot they were having.

Rob plucks the phone out of her stalling hands, clearly impatient, and opens it because she never bothered to change the code after the last time he accidentally learnt it.

“You know you’re supposed to let me do this myself? Be quietly supportive or whatever?”

“Yeah,” he says, sounding more dismissive than she thinks he actually is. “I also know that usually you don’t wait 4 days to tell anyone unless you’re planning on doing it again.” His thumb is hovering over Dr Miller’s name, but he hasn’t pressed it. He just stares at her, face as blank as he can make it, but eyes questioning.

“How do you know that, really?” She says, mostly joking, grinning through the sick feeling of anxiety bubbling up in her stomach. Trying to ignore that little useless voice in her brain reminding her that she’s back in this place again. That she’s failed.

“What do you want to do?” Robert says, after a moment, thumb still hovering over her phone screen.

She stares at him, knowing for all the world that her answer is _go back in time_ , and knowing that she can’t quite bring herself to say it out loud. She thinks Robert knows anyway, because he hands her back her phone and shoves his arm around her shoulders, between her back and the sofa, in the most obnoxiously uncomfortable position possible. She leans into him all the same and lets the steady feeling of his chest moving up and down with each breath ground her as she hits _call_.


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i wrote this ages ago and forgot to post it. que @ my life choices.
> 
> come find me on tumblr @ littleatticboy

When Aaron and Robert first renovated the Mill, Robert put in this ridiculous drinks fridge in the kitchen. It was as big as the actual fridge and always fully stocked - mostly with beer. Their house always had a lot of booze in it, really. It never quite stopped her from stealing from David’s, or the pub - alcohol was alcohol. Readily available at any corner.

The fridge is still there, filled with water these days, or juice. There's still alcohol in the house, beers in the main fridge mostly. Eight years of not displaying it prominently had become habit, she thinks, leftover consideration from the early days that she's mostly still quietly thankful for.

The call with Dr Miller is quick and to the point. She’s adamant she can wait two days until their next session. Group therapy never worked for Liv - ended up being near enough her worst nightmare really. She’s too prickly, she thinks, when it comes to this, and so it never benefitted her in the way she sees it work for others. Dr Miller was the first person who really made her understand anything beyond _feelings bad, drink good._ Robert hates her - he pays her, always has, and she's fascinated by him. The family sessions she set up in the early days were some of the most morbidly entertaining moments Liv had witnessed in that office.

Aaron is walking down the stairs as Liv is saying her goodbyes. Rob gets up to grab them both some water, pointedly moving away to give the illusion of privacy, a silent prompt to tell Aaron the truth.

He reacts about as predictably as possible - he hugs her tight and it feels safe and warm, like it always does. His jaw is working a little, she can feel him wanting to ask if it's related to Steven, something he did, but he knows better than to ask and she doesn't volunteer anything.

“If you stay tonight-” Aaron starts, voice tinged slightly with that hard learnt firmness he had to develop through parenting her.

“I’ve already missed out on an entire day at the house by coming here at midday,” she says, rolling her eyes as she cuts him off.

“Would you like some help?” He sticks his hands up quickly, “it's just an offer. I'm not saying you need to.”

She thinks about going back to the house alone, the idea of a free night tonight with no one around and trying to lose herself in mindless painting tomorrow. Some days it’s almost therapeutic, just her and manual labour and the radio turned low, or Grizzly Neil in the next room over humming Christmas songs, regardless of the season. Other days, it doesn't even begin to fill up the space where her thoughts and feelings are - the one she’s always trying to escape from - too boring to be a real distraction. She knows which one it will be tomorrow.

“Yeah. Alright.” She smiles at him, wide and cheeky as she can manage. “Bet I can paint more walls than you.”

It's an old bet. When she first bought a house - the first one she flipped, 5 years ago at the age of 19, with a huge inheritance to spend and all these grand ideas of how to spend it and make more money - she, Rob and Aaron would spend weekend after weekend there, doing it up, making it into something she could sell. She did the large bulk of work herself, outsourced the stuff she couldn't, but it was almost like a family bonding experience, those weekends when Aaron and Robert would come and lend a hand.

Robert would rarely do any actual work, honestly. Mostly stalked through empty, dust-covered rooms looking over her plans, or talking to people on the phone - the plumber, the electrician, stuff like that. He'd overheard her trying to deal with one of them very early on and after 2 solid minutes of staring at her like she'd grown another head, plucked the phone out of her hands and took over. It was infuriating, but he knew what he was doing and almost immediately she realised she was more than happy to let him continue, offered to cut him in just to take them all off her hands and leave her to the fun part.

She and Aaron would spend hours just painting and talking, criticising the other’s work good-naturedly. Nothing ever felt as much like home as working with him on that first house that neither of them ever intended to keep.

Liv had spent her whole life looking for stability, one place to settle into that felt like her own, Somehow, somewhere along the way, she realised that it wasn’t a single house she needed.  The transient nature of moving from house to cottage to flat, fixing it up and moving along once it was shiny and perfect, as good as new, somehow became her reliable norm. The stability she found was in Aaron and then later in Robert - hilarious, she thinks, given that they had always been possibly the least stable two people on the planet, but true nonetheless.

Perfection, the dictionary definition of it, she thinks, is about as overrated as a thing can be.  

 

* * *

 

They’re camped out in front of the TV, Liv and Aaron piling handfuls of cashew nuts into their mouths from the bowl between them and Robert pretending like he’s not going crazy at the noise of chewing. Liv isn’t really paying attention to whatever daytime game show they’re watching, she’s mostly focused on her phone. She can hear Robert playing a stupid game on his own phone in the background from the armchair he’s sprawled across - a barrage of light taps as his fingers hit the screen in a furious tattoo.

She hears the front door open and looks up towards it, across Aaron, who’s too busy muttering an answer to one of the questions on the TV to notice. Noah’s oversized backpack appears first as he enters the Mill backwards, just a tuft of bright spiky hair visible over the top of it.

“What are you doing?” She calls over to him.

He turns and smiles awkwardly at her.

“They always gets stuck.”

“No, that’s just you being rubbish at keys.” Rob says without even looking up, like he’s said the same thing twenty times before.

“You gave me a bad set.” Noah argues as he dumps his bag directly on top of Liv’s, then moves towards them, keys apparently finally free from their awkward keyhole prison.

“I already swapped my set with yours. It’s not the keys.” Rob says and pauses his game. He jerks his head towards them all.

Noah, 22 and a particularly prickly type of awkward even now he’s managed to drag himself out of his teens, stays in Liv’s old room 6.5 days out of 7. She’s not sure that any sort of formal agreement was ever made with Charity, rather Noah just started coming round, largely to spend time with Robert, and at some point decided to never leave. Probably, after 6 years, she should just refer to it as his room. She’s pretty sure everyone else already does.

She and Aaron can’t quite understand it, this all-encompassing adoration Noah has of Robert Sugden. At all. She loves Robert, don’t get her wrong, he’s one of her favourite people and he’s her family, and Aaron married him and she’s pretty confident Aaron loves him more than any of them, but Noah seems to have dedicated his life to somehow _becoming_ Robert, which she has tried to tell him any number of times is a horrible idea, because Robert is always two breaths away from doing something life- or person-destroying, but that just seems to add to the inexplicable appeal.

She’s not even entirely sure that Aaron and Robert got any kind of say in Noah moving in - one day he was there and then 6 months later they all realised he hadn’t left yet. More than that, somewhere during those six months, they realised they didn’t even want him to. He’s family. The most annoying and fantastic little brother a person could have.

She knows all about useless mums, anyway. She loves hers with all her heart, but together, they were never the type of steady family she needed, or wanted from life. She thinks Noah is the same. Two virtual orphans, for all intents and purposes, who latched on to Robert and Aaron and never found the will or desire within them to let go.

Noah throws himself down on the ground in front of Liv, head leaning back, hair brushing against her knees where they’re drawn under her body, She bends forward and lightly flicks his ear, before going back to staring at her phone screen and the still unanswered messages sent to Steven 4 days ago,

“I heard you dumped Steve.” Noah says, rubbing his ear and looking up at her ruefully.

She can see Robert and Aaron give one another a Deep and Meaningful Look and she rolls her eyes at them, before quietly passing the phone down to Noah, still open on the messages.

He laughs instinctively, sharp and cruel. This would be a thing he’d enjoy, this level of thoughtlessness - but then he looks back up at her, eyes narrowing ever so slightly, questioning, clearly having seen the time stamp.

“I called Dr Miller,” she responds, as matter-of-factly as possible, snatching her phone back. Noah doesn’t say anything else, just quietly turns back to the TV and keeps watching, but he adjusts his head so it’s more firmly against her legs and she can see his slight frown on the slither of his face that’s still visible to her.

They’ve all been through this before - Liv slipping, Liv falling off the wagon. Just a small handful of usually isolated incidents, outside of two years ago, when Aaron lost to her in a three-day coma, and four years ago, with Jason.

She can hear Aaron sigh, the silence between them all thick and sad. She knows she caused this, knew it would feel this way, and still she feels that weight on her chest, like Steven himself has dragged his entire 6 foot 1 body out of her phone and placed himself on directly on top of where her lungs are still trying to breathe.

“We’re not all going to sit around moping, are we?” Aaron says, suddenly, brightly almost.  Brightly for him. “I’m losing this anyway,” he mutters, throwing a hopeless glance towards the gameshow still playing on the TV. He stands up, uses his arms to bodily haul himself out of the sofa and then sticks a hand out towards Liv.

She looks up at him disdainfully, even as her lungs start to ease outwards ever so slightly.

“What?” She says, seeing Robert stand up and finally tuck his phone into his pocket.

“We’re going to the house. C’mon, we’ve still got hours before tea. We can make a start on that painting.”

She’s not sure it’s the right thing to say, doesn’t know that it’s the thing that’s finally going to empty her mind a little, give her some space and a distraction away from her thoughts, but she thinks if she agrees, then she can probably guilt Robert and Noah to do some manual labour too and that feels like too good and rare and opportunity to pass up.

“Fine, but Robert needs to change out of his suit.”

“That’s fine, I’ll just put some of his rags on.” Rob says, head jerking towards Aaron. Aaron grins and reaches out to poke at Robert’s stomach.

“Yeah, wouldn’t want to ruin that brown shirt, would we?”

“You what?”

Liv quickly tunes them out, knowing she’s not going to want to hear the end of wherever this conversation is going, and turns to stare down Noah. He stares up at her defiantly, still refusing to stand, looking somehow exactly like the 12 year old she first met 10 years earlier.

“Are you gonna make me paint?”

“Do you still live in my room rent free or-?”

“You don’t even need it!”

“I could ask for it back.”

“This is blackmail.”

“Nah, that’s coercion mate.” Aaron says quietly, eyes still focused on Robert retreating up the stairs.

“D’you learn that being married to him?” Liv says, grinning as Robert turns around and shoots her a sardonic smile.

“As it happens…”

“Fine, I’m getting up.” Noah says, clearly having reached his conversation limit, stretching out to turn the TV off as he goes to follow Robert up the stairs and put some old clothes on. Liv’s quietly placing bets with herself that Robert catches him and throws him something of Aaron’s to wear, just to wind Aaron up.

“Hey,” Aaron says quietly, suddenly close beside her. “I’m proud of ya.”

She stares up at him balefully, having heard this all before but still feeling a slight, sad burst of warmth trickling through her chest.

“Are ya.” She says, flat as she can make it sound even with her heart picking up the pace ever so slightly.

“Mmm.” He sticks an arm around her and pulls her in close to his side. “I can tell Pinky and the Brain to stick around here if you just wanna go by ourselves?”

He smiles down at her, eyes searching her face.

“I’m not-”

“Liv, I’m not trying to treat you like you’re about to break. Not unless you tell me you are.” He pauses and stares at her hard. “Just tell me what you want.”

She sighs, shakes her head slightly and then wraps her arms around Aaron so that they’re really hugging, for lack of knowing what else she can do.

“I can’t even be sad about the break up, can I? I don’t even have the space. It’s all about the relapse.”

“Were you really going to be _that sad_ about the break up in the first place?”

“I knew you didn’t like him.” She says, soft and accusatory into his ear, before pulling back and releasing him. His hands move up to her shoulders and rest there, heavy and comforting. His face flits through 5 different expressions as he tries to work out how to answer her.

“Doesn’t matter anyway,” she says, taking pity on him. “They should come with. I want them to come. Could do with the distraction.”

He nods, understanding. They have different problems but it all comes from the same place, she thinks. Maybe science wouldn’t agree, but she and Aaron - they understand one another on a level that no one else has ever quite come close to. It makes sense to her, anyway, somewhere in her brain.

“Besides, I’m not gonna pass up getting Rob to do some actual work.”

He grins toothily, makes a noise of huffed laughter and squeezes her shoulder, then uses one arm to tug her back in again, hooks it around her neck. She leans into him, still just short enough that her head fits neatly on his shoulder. She thinks about all the disparate things she wants to say - _distract me, let me talk about it, I don’t know how to get him to talk to me about it, I don’t know whether I want him to talk to me about it_. Instead, she just stares, eyes moving first towards the big transparent fridge where the beers used to be, then to the actual fridge where the beers really are, and finally back up to the stairs, as they wait for the rest of their family to come back down.

**Author's Note:**

> i have more written blah blah blah let's just not expect this to be a complete thing


End file.
